EDITORIAL

Dear Readers, It is our great pleasure to bring forth this ninth volume of our journal Savijïänam — Scientific Exploration for a Spiritual Paradigm. The articles featured in this volume are thought provoking as they address various challenging questions for humanity. Ethics and values are integral part of our life. In recent times, the profound questions in bioethics are attracting people from different disciplines to seek for the right answers.

Bioethics, Science of Life and Spirituality

The first article in this volume presents a stimulating dialogue on bioethics, science of life and spirituality between Prof. Arthur A. Caplan, Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor of Bioethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center and Dr. T. D. Singh, Founder-Director, Bhaktivedanta Institute, Kolkata, India. The dialogue brings-forth how the bioethical issues like abortion, euthanasia, cloning, etc., are becoming essential to discuss globally with advancement of technology. It has also been discussed that spiritual wisdom can contribute to ethical views by enlightening on the essence of life, its meaning and purpose.

The Search for The Perfect Language

The next article, “The Search for the Perfect Language” by Gregory John Chaitin, Federal University, Rio de Janeiro, is bound to fascinate the minds of the readers as it talks about the prospect of finding the perfect language with which this world could have been algorithmically programmed. This mathematical idea is similar to physicists` attempt to find a foundational “Theory of Every-thing” in physics. Initially the author presents a broad sweep of the history of mathematical logic based on the revolutionary works of Raymond Lull, Leibniz, Huygens, Hilbert, Cantor, Bertrand Russel, von Neumann, GÎdel, Turing, etc. Though the mathematicians have been trying to find a perfect language and a perfect formal axiomatic theory for all of mathematical truths, they found that incompleteness of such a formalization, algorithmic irreducibility and algorithmic randomness are limiting them.

Experiments in Computational Metaphysics

Christoph Benzmüller, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, FU Berlin, Germany & CSLI/Cordula Hall, Stanford University, CA, USA and Bruno Woltzenlogel Paleo, College of Engineering and Science, ANU, Canberra,Australia jointly present the third article on “Experiments on Computational Metaphysics: GÎdel’s Proof of God’s Existence”. The article presents a glimpse of their work supported by automated theorem provers on Kurt GÎdel’s ontological argument for the existence of God. This work shows that existence of God is not a mere assumption, but a foundational truth